Why staff retention is a top priority today
A revolving door of staff and high employee turnover isn’t what you want to be spending your time and energy on. Instead, you want staff members that stick around, learn your processes and become empowered enough to evolve into leaders, like you.
To ensure your business thrives, you need to have a happy, energised staff that feel they are key players in your company and are dedicated to supporting you in the long term. One sure way to do that is by making staff retention a priority.
Prioritising employee retention is important in creating a positive and productive work environment that is scalable and sustainable in the long run. By ensuring that your employees feel adequately challenged and a valuable part of the team, you maximise their retention rate and secure loyal and high-achieving staff.
With so many enticing job opportunities available to lure your best staff away, you need to implement effective retention strategies to keep your staff from being poached by competitors and leaving you stranded. It’s important to understand that there are a lot of different reasons people choose to leave a great position. Sometimes your employees don’t feel they’re able to contribute anything meaningful, they may grow complacent, reach their peak or feel burnt out and mismatched with what your business is trying to achieve.
When your staff can easily find other companies to help them grow and find their footing in terms of the career they want, it puts pressure on you to establish measures that will keep them from jumping ship and bring both of you mutual growth and success.
Training staff to be the best while giving them the best opportunities locks them in and boosts your success.
5 reasons why you need to show you value your team
Not only are you boosting staff productivity when you retain employees over a long period of time, but you also increase morale and overall workplace happiness. This is because your staff can form bonds and get excited about their work, making them more efficient and giving them more personal satisfaction.
One of the biggest factors that leads to long-term staff retention is having staff feel valued.
Here are five big benefits you can achieve by demonstrating that you value your team and the individuals that make it all happen.
1. You can build a team of leaders
In order to lead your staff effectively you’ll need to exhibit key leadership qualities and work on your rapport-building skills to inspire your staff and make them feel more at home and comfortable. If they know they can rely on you and believe in your vision just as strongly as you do, they’ll put their trust in you, want to stay and contribute to reaching your business goals.
Through quality leadership you can empower your staff to be more independent by showing them you care while also continuing to challenge them in their work to show you know there is more they are capable of. When this is managed in a fun and motivating way your team won’t grow complacent and they’ll appreciate the work you set for them.
As well as delegating and supervising, being a good leader means letting your staff grow on their own as well. Allowing them to work autonomously and manage other team members will build their leadership skills, stretch their abilities and boost their confidence.
When you’re a good leader by example, you create leaders in return, helping you succeed in attaining your business goals.
2. You empower your team to adapt to different stages of business growth
There are five stages of business growth a company will go through when trying to establish a business:
- Existence - This is where you conceptualise your business and how feasible it is for you to put it together. You experiment a lot in this stage because you’re still trying to figure out how to earn revenue in the most cost-effective way.
- Survival - This stage is where you try to establish your customer base and find ways to sustain your business because you’ve begun to maintain a stable cash flow.
- Success - This stage is split into two:
- Success-disengagement: Many businesses, given that the industry doesn’t change too much, prefer to stay in this stage because they earn more than just marginal returns–they thrive. They disengage from the growth process and are happy to be earning what they are.
- Success growth: This stage is where a business uses its relatively stable position and income to try new things and takes new risks to try and scale further.
- Take off - This is where your business truly “takes off” and you have the possibility of going from being small to medium to big business–with the numbers to back that new status up.
- Resource maturity - When you reach this stage, you’re likely one of the leaders–if not the leader–of your industry and you can weather many changes with some adjustments to your approaches and processes.
Identifying the stage of growth you’re currently in and preparing yourself to move on to the next one will allow you and your team to be more agile and adapt to unexpected challenges.
Being transparent about where your business is and where you want to take it helps ease everyone’s worries. If your staff are in the dark about the business position and direction, they’ll only feel anxious and insecure about their work. It’s difficult to move forward or know where you’re going when you don’t even know where you are.
3. You inspire collaboration and a creative workplace environment
When you explicitly show your team you value their work it encourages them to collaborate and become more creative because they’ll feel more confident and want to team up with their colleagues to solve problems and earn more praise and attention for great work.
Your staff’s problem-solving and communication skills improve as they come together to brainstorm how they can create new solutions for your business. You’ll soon find them pushing the boundaries on what your business can do through suggestions to upgrade or refine your products and processes to strengthen and maximise your business success.
Some key benefits of collaboration in the workplace are:
- Excitement and inspiration
- Business flexibility when it comes to unanticipated changes
- Better customer service
- Employee engagement
- A more positive work environment
4. You help your team grow through upskilling programs (reducing turnover costs)
Upskilling opportunities empower your staff to sharpen their expertise and learn new things. When you offer upskilling programs, you diversify your staff’s skills and make them even more valuable to you and your business. You also show that you’re invested in their growth and their individual success, as well.
Investing in upskilling programs can help you reduce turnover costs such as hiring, formal training, and induction.
There are three key considerations in building a successful upskilling program:
- Encourage and empower your employees to take control of their own growth
- Gather information on individual employee goals
- Show them a forecast of their future opportunities with you if they stay long-term
5. You provide a diverse and inclusive company culture
A warm, inclusive culture will encourage each staff member to open up and feel more comfortable sharing their ideas, thoughts or opinions about processes and how they can be improved. Inclusivity also promotes diversity because your team is more open to different perspectives and has respect for each other.
Having a diverse pool of talent and skills within your company is important for building a well-rounded team and growing your business rapidly. People from different walks of life will be able to contribute, drawing on personal and professional experience and perspectives to weigh in on how services, processes and systems can be improved and enhanced to serve the team and your customers more efficiently.
When your staff are performing well, let them know. It’s important to show your high-performing staff members that they are integral to the team to keep turnover low and efficiency high. Keeping each individual satisfied through varied and challenging work tasks allows them to grow and build their career and stave off complacency. When you show them how they can further their career within your business you give them something to aim for personally, which will go a long way in maximising your chances of keeping them long-term.
If you find your staff are feeling restless, a change of scenery might be the best way to go. A bright and modern office environment that offers lots of open space for collaboration and socialisation will boost morale and productivity and give your team that feeling of value and support. @workspaces has coworking offices available across multiple locations that will give your staff a fresh perspective, all for less than leasing your own office space.
